A rectangular article such as a pouch to be filled with a liquid cleaning agent is boxed and shipped from a pouch manufacturing factory. A plurality of pouches manufactured in a manufacturing line (a pouch manufacturing process) are bound and sequentially packed in a box body. As one of packing forms, there is a form usually called “vertical loading” for inserting pouch bundles of pouches (usually, twenty-five to fifty pouches are bundled as one batch) into a carton in an upright state.
A problem in automating the packing of this vertical loading is that, in a process for inserting the pouch bundle into the carton, a preceding batch already inserted into the carton and the present batch cause interference. In particular, a standing pouch such as a pouch with a spout section has a bottom material. A bottom section of the pouch is approximately twice as thick as the other portion. Therefore, after the insertion into the carton, a phenomenon tends to occur in which, because of a shift due to swelling of the pouch bundle, alignment is disordered and the pouch bundle cannot be stored in a desired position in the carton, the pouch bundle conveyed in the next batch hits the pouch bundle of the preceding batch, and the pouch bundles are not neatly inserted into the carton. Because of such a reason, conventionally, the automatic packing of the standing pouch form is difficult and manual boxing has been performed.
Under such circumstances, Patent Document 1 has been proposed that has a purpose of providing a pouch automatic packing method for bundling, in particular, pouch having different vertical thicknesses, loading the pouches in a container in an aligned state automatically and not to cause load shifting even after storage, and automatically packing the pouches, an apparatus for the pouch automatic packing method, and a robot hand apparatus of a robot used in the asparagus. The pouch automatic packing method of the invention includes a step of binding a plurality of stacked pouches, a step of loading two bundles of the bound pouches bundles one on top of the other with directions thereof changed from each other on a tray conveyed by a tray conveying apparatus, a step of placing a pad on the upper surface of the pouch bundles transferred onto the tray, and a container storage step of gripping, from the tray, with the robot, a pouch bundle group on which the pat is placed and sequentially loading and storing the pouch bundles in a container for pouch transportation. Two pouch bundles overlapping each other vertically reversely in the container is set as one stage. The pouch bundles are automatically stored and packed in a state in which the pouch bundles are stacked with pats interposed among stages. However, the pouch automatic packing method requires manual work for manually bundling a predetermined number of, for example, fifty pouches discharged from a pouch manufacturing machine and, after inspection, inserting the pouches into a packet of a binding apparatus in a state in which the pouches are bundled in the same direction. The pouch automatic packing method also requires work for inserting the bundled pouches into the packet and binding the bundled pouches with the binding apparatus to bind the bundled pouches as one pouch bundle.